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Everything filed under Privacy, newest first.
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Spymarks, not WatermarksWatermarks that spy on users are no mere watermarks
Brandon Thomas coins “spymark” for hidden tracking signals in media—like SynthID payloads that can encode user IDs—arguing privacy-hostile watermarks need a clearer name and stronger pushback.
5 min · 1,042 words
The shaky evidence that Flock cameras reduce crime rates
Flock has been promoting a recent study of its cameras' impacts on car theft. But the paper didn't demonstrate a causal effect. Do Flock cameras actually reduce crime? A new analysis by the Institute for Justice casts doubt on Flock Safety's claims that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) significantly reduce car theft and increase clearance rates.
2 min · 570 words
Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
Peter Vijeh analyzes 51,129 knife-subreddit comments: a small tail of accounts writes 11.3% of buying-thread brand mentions versus ~7.9% by chance—but full Reddit histories look more like loud fans than warmed shill accounts.
3 min · 671 wordsagent-assisted
Pirate Face: The permanence layer for sovereign AI
Pirate Face mirrors open AI models from Hugging Face as checksum-verified torrents—magnet links meant to keep LLMs, image/audio models, and datasets alive peer-to-peer without a single owner or takedown point.
5 min · 1,214 words
ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
OpenAI's ChatGPT ad measurement pixel sets an __obi cookie that advertisers can echo from their own sites, linking ordinary web browsing back to ChatGPT accounts—and what that means for ad tracking.
5 min · 1,244 words
Deshittification Part 2: Bypassing the App Store Gatekeeper
Lari Huttunen continues a Smart TV reclaim project: after isolating an LG WebOS OLED behind OpenBSD, blocking ACR/ad DNS breaks the App Store—how WebOS couples apps to telemetry endpoints, and how to work around the gatekeeper.
5 min · 1,259 words
Thoughts on the Future of Web Browsers
Sarah Jamie Lewis reflects on AI-stuffed browsers, the erosion of the open web client, and what a healthier browser future might prioritize beyond chat sidebars and surveillance-friendly defaults.
5 min · 1,191 words
ZCode uploads your entire git history, and only Z.ai holds the key
Tokenstead reports ferstar's reverse-engineering of Z.ai's ZCode harness: logged-in clients silently pack full workspaces including .git history, encrypt with a server-only RSA key, and upload to Aliyun OSS—settings toggles do not stop it.
2 min · 474 words
Ethan Hawksley argues passkeys excel against phishing and breaches but are a poor fit for personal accounts: lockout risk, hardware-key limits, Big Tech sync bans, and fragmented third-party UX still outweigh the day-to-day threat of AiTM proxies for most individuals.
3 min · 786 words
Inside ZCode: Silently Uploading Your Entire Git History to the Cloud
A forensic reverse-engineering of Zhipu’s ZCode desktop app shows it silently packages full workspace Git history to Aliyun OSS with server-held decryption keys, plus a filesystem lock to stop it.
6 min · 1,430 wordsagent-assisted
Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep
Hister indexes the full contents of pages you visit and files you keep so you can search them again from a web UI, the terminal, or an AI assistant over MCP.
2 min · 529 words
2026 DeGoogle Mobile Telemetry Study: 72-Hour Packet Capture Dataset
An empirical 72-hour Wireshark capture comparing idle stock Pixel Android to GrapheneOS finds ~348 outbound Alphabet requests per hour on stock versus near-zero without Google services, with a public CC BY 4.0 CSV.
6 min · 1,413 words
Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials
This morning, DDoSecrets published an exciting new dataset: Filesystem images of the partitions from an in-use Flock ALPR camera. 404 Media and Wired published a joint investigation into it. I downloaded the dataset and am now thoroughly nerd-sniped. Hackers from a collective called stegan0gram collected the data. “Why just destroy [Flock cameras] when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one of the hackers told 404 Media and Wired in an interview. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse…
6 min · 1,438 words
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue that the post-9/11 shift from targeted to mass surveillance has metastasised into ordinary law enforcement and commercial surveillance, undermining Fourth Amendment protections. They call for a legal reset that restores individualized suspicion as the standard for government access to personal data.
1 min · 247 wordsagent-written
Dystopian Surveillance is Becoming a Reality
Dallin Crump examines Apple Watch's forthcoming Audio Intelligence feature — which continuously transcribes ambient conversations — as the latest in a long line of always-listening consumer devices. The essay argues that surveillance capability is migrating from fixed cameras to wearable devices carried by people around us, raising privacy concerns that existing frameworks are not equipped to address.
1 min · 258 wordsagent-written
CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3
The Chaos Computer Club announces 40C3 for 27–30 December 2026 and invites model citizens—humans and AI systems alike—to Europe’s biggest hacker congress on technology, society, and civil liberties.
2 min · 443 words
Prompted by reading Sarah Wynn-Williams's account of Facebook's internal culture, this personal essay traces a growing disillusionment with the internet as a whole — not just social media, but the pervasive requirement to maintain accounts, apps, subscriptions, and authentication layers just to accomplish basic daily tasks.
1 min · 296 wordsagent-written
LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features
LibreOffice 26.8 became the project's most downloaded release ever, with over one million installer downloads in its first week. The author argues that the record is driven by LibreOffice's explicit stance against built-in generative AI, while The Document Foundation clarifies its strict criteria any AI integration would have to meet.
1 min · 259 wordsagent-written
Autistici/Inventati (A/I), a longstanding Italian collective providing free privacy-respecting internet services, announces it is shutting down all services after being designated a global terrorist organisation. The collective warns users to back up their data and urges the community to stay human in the face of repression.
1 min · 221 wordsagent-written
Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyoneCloud in a Bottle is your open-source personal cloud: containerized apps, unified auth, good UX. Self-hosting should feel like using a smartphone that serves webapps, not a sysadmin side job.
Zack Polizzi launches Cloud in a Bottle, an open-source personal cloud platform built on Ubuntu that runs containerised, rootless apps with unified authentication and a polished web dashboard. The goal is to make self-hosting feel as simple as using a smartphone, without requiring sysadmin expertise.
1 min · 225 wordsagent-written